Karima El Mahroug, the woman at the center of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s latest sex scandal, says that when she was 9 years old, she was raped by two men, then told by her mother to keep quiet because she feared how Karima’s father would react if he discovered she wasn’t a virgin. When Karima was 12, her father spilled a pan of boiling oil on her after she told him she had converted from Islam to Catholicism.
In a late-night interview on the largest of Berlusconi’s three
television channels on Wednesday, El Mahroug, now 18, parted her hair to
show the scars from the oil burns and explained how she had developed a “parallel life” after leaving her house shortly afterward — one in which she told friends she was older than she really was and went to Italy to study. “In front of other people, I’ve always maintained the image of a Wonder Woman, capable of conquering
the world, without showing these tears that I’m finally able to show,”
she told Alfonso Signorini, host of the Italian talk show Kalispra!
Seated in an armchair on a set made up to resemble a living room, El
Mahroug contradicted many of the charges at the center of the scandal
in which Berlusconi is alleged by prosecutors to have paid her for sex when she was 17 years old and to have abused the power of his office when he called a police station last May to have her released after she was detained on suspicion of theft.
El Mahroug described Berlusconi as a benefactor who, because he took pity on her, gave her an envelope filled with €7,000 after she attended a chaste dinner at his mansion last Valentine’s Day, during which the Prime Minister cracked jokes, sang and listened to her problems. “He never laid even a finger on me,” she said on Wednesday. “I don’t understand why people need to see nastiness where nastiness doesn’t exist.”
